Surely, most of you have noticed the pervasiveness of the high protein diet trend, either on social media or on store shelves. It’s no longer just bars and shakes. High protein items are everywhere, in chips, ice cream, pancakes, bread, candy, you name it.
You can’t go five minutes without seeing a video of somebody fawning over some new food product exclaiming, “Can you believe it has a whopping 45 grams of protein?”
Well, I tried some of those products, and they taste like sawdust and sadness, so yes, I believe it.
Figuring out what to eat these days can be exhausting, whether you’re trying to lose weight or merely eat a healthy diet.
Eat the carnivore diet! You’ve got to try keto! Vegetarian is the way to go! Actually, vegan is best! No, Paleo! No, Mediterranean!
The advice out there is confusing and conflicting and often fear-mongering.
Not enough or too much?
It doesn’t matter what the food group, Americans are simultaneously eating too little of it and too much at the same time. And both are terrible for our health. Here are just a few examples of conflicting food information I have seen:
■ Americans don’t eat enough protein … But eating red meat causes cancer and increases the risk of heart disease. The mercury in fish, especially tuna, can damage your nervous system and kidneys.
■ Americans don’t eat enough vegetables … But some vegetables have too many carbohydrates and they are covered in pesticides unless you buy the expensive organic kind hardly anyone can afford.
■ Americans don’t eat enough fruit, which provides essential vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants … But fruit is bad for your sugar levels and can cause inflammation, insulin resistance and even diabetes.
■ Americans don’t drink enough water … But our water has the wrong pH and doesn’t have enough minerals. Our water shouldn’t have fluoride because it melts your brain, except for our water absolutely needs fluoride or your teeth will rot.
Everything is bad. Everything.
Broccoli is bad for your thyroid! Soy messes with your hormones! Seed oils are going to destroy your immune system!
Corn syrup is terrible for you. Oh wait, only high fructose corn syrup is bad. Actually, all sugar is bad, even honey. Except for honey is great for preventing allergies, and if you don’t get enough sugar your brain won’t work.
You need more yogurt and fermented food for your gut’s microbiome, and you need it for calcium. But our milk is a poisonous soup chock-full of antibiotics and growth hormones.
We can’t even reach a consensus on “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” An apple? With that kind of sugar content? No, thanks.
The ancestors
People love to invoke “our ancestors” as the gospel on how to eat, despite the extremely low life expectancy of our forebearers. Sure, maybe our ancestors were a little trimmer than we were, but with many people not living past 30, it’s hard not to wonder if they were truly healthier than us.
I hear all types of theories about what our ancestors ate.
“We should be eating a meat and animal-product based diet instead of vegetables and carbohydrates. That’s what our carnivore ancestors did.”
“Hunter gatherers ate relatively little meat and most of their diet came from foraging. Diets should be based around nuts, mushrooms, berries and honey, like what our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate.”
“Carbs are the enemy. If you eat carbs, you can’t go into ketosis, which allows you to burn fat. Our ancestors didn’t eat carbs, and they were outrunning lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) to survive.”
Might I throw my hat into the dieting advice ring and suggest we take up a diet of woolly mammoth?
When the diet backfires
Someone I know was trying to eat a heart-healthy diet. Instead of eating fast food for lunch, he took what he thought was the healthy route and packed his lunch every day for years. He’d heard about the health benefits of nuts: They’re full of healthy fats that can lower bad cholesterol and raise good cholesterol; they’re full of fiber, which can help reduce cholesterol, improve blood sugar control, and help reduce the risk of colon cancer; they contain antioxidants and vitamins that protect the heart. He also packed cans of “healthy soup” and switched from drinking soda to drinking unsweetened tea.
He really thought he was doing all the right things to protect his health. Unfortunately, his diet was the perfect recipe to create kidney stones. Nuts, canned foods and black tea are all on the no-no list for kidney stones. Ouch. So much for trying to be healthy.
A few years ago, while trying to follow the keto diet and obsessively counting every carbohydrate that came within sniffing distance of my mouth, I found myself so stressed out about what to eat for dinner I was near tears.
After a couple of months of the diet, I was so tired of eating meat, had just finished what felt like my 5,000th block cheese for the week, couldn’t stomach the idea of another pork rind, and the only fresh vegetables I had handy were raw baby carrots, which I knew would put me over my daily carb limit. I don’t even like raw carrots and I was nearly sobbing because I wasn’t allowed to have them.
So who’s right?
As every condescending, naturally thin podcast bro who burns 6,000 calories a day sitting on his couch says, “It’s simple math; calories in verses calories out. You can’t change the laws of thermodynamics.”
So there you go, folks, it doesn’t matter what you eat, as long as you count those calories … except if you don’t lose weight while counting your calories, you’re either lying or somehow managing to not notice that you’re eating 2,000 extra calories a day of ketchup and coffee creamer.
Or, you’ve put your body into the mysterious “starvation mode,” convincing your body it’s starving, which somehow allows it to break those unchangeable laws of thermodynamics and is bad for weight loss. Unless, of course, you are intermittent fasting to convince your body it’s starving, which is the goal and will help you lose weight. Good grief.